... (c ) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 38) Winter 1999 Last | Contents | Next Issue 38 George Orwell and the IRD John Newsinger In their recent history of the Information Research Department (IRD), Paul Lashmar and James Oliver discuss George Orwell's decision to collaborate with that organisation's anti-Communist propaganda operations. They write that 'George Orwell's reputation as a left-wing icon took a body blow from which it may never recover when it was revealed in 1996 that he had cooperated closely with the IRD's Cold Warriors, even offering his own blacklist of eighty-six Communist fellow-travellers... '( 1 ) This echoed the ...

... (c ) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 45) Summer 2003 Last | Contents | Next Issue 45 Feedback From Ernest Wistrich Dear Sir, I have read the article 'Spinning the European Union: pro-European propaganda campaigns in the British media' by Andy Mullen in your Winter 2002 issue. Whilst it contains a number of minor inaccuracies it includes one major misrepresentation, namely that the European Movement, of which I was director between 1969 and 1986, received funding from the CIA and that the accounting structure of the Movement was designed to hide this fact. When Mr. Mullen interviewed me for the purposes of his article he did not put ...

... (c ) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 47) Summer 2004 Last | Contents | Next Issue 47 Tell me lies: Propaganda and Media Distortion in the Attack on Iraq ed. David Millar London: Pluto, 2003, 12.99, p/back One of the downsides of appearing every six months is that occasionally books arrive just too late for the issue in which they should appear and by the time the next issue appears they have lost some of their zip. This is one such. When I received it just before Lobster 46 was published, the details of the invasion of Iraq and the way the media handled it, ...

... agencies within the intelligence community in the United Kingdon believed that unorthodox methods and techniques were required in the war. The intervention of these groupings, which included Special Branch, military intelligence, MI5 and MI6, was uncoordinated. Much has been written about that period, some of it honest journalism, but most of it (emphasis added) propaganda inspired by the terrorists and their supporters.... One area of the dirty war which I was obliged to confront was the use of black propaganda by the terrorists as well as the intelligence agencies, and how propaganda led to the deliberate or accidental creation of conspiracy theories. Much of the evidence in print or by word of ...

... Business, propaganda and terror The Phoenix Program: America's Use of Terror in Vietnam Douglas Valentine 1990 Reissued by Open Roads as e-book in the new series 'Forbidden Bookshelf' curated by Mark Crispin Miller, 2014. Dr. T. P. Wilkinson D ouglas Valentine explained the purpose or at least the subject of his study of the Vietnam Phoenix Program as 'terror and its role in political warfare'. He is generous, like most Americans — even critical ones — when he writes: 'It will show how, as successive American governments sink deeper and deeper into the vortex of covert operations — ostensibly to combat terrorism and Communist insurgencies — the American people gradually lose touch ...

... "Kodumaa," Number 41, (677), contained on page 3 an interview with KIM PHILBY. "Kodumaa" (Homeland) is published in Estonian by the Soviet Committee for Cultural Relations With Compatriots Abroad. "Kodumaa" is published in Tallinn, Estonia. The Soviet Committee For Cultural Relations With Compatriots Abroad is a Soviet propaganda organization founded in East Berlin, Germany, in 1955; and since that time has been edited by various Soviet officials. The Committee publishes a magazine entitled "Homeland" and a newspaper entitled "Voice of the Homeland" in Russian, Latvian, Estonian, Ukrainian, Georgian and other related languages. Such publications, which are mailed ...

... on the miners for the second time (and losing); and fighting a 'Who rules? ' election (and losing). And so the return of Harold Wilson and the extraordinary events of 1974 - about which much more below. Arbitrarily we can locate the beginning of this in 1969 when the Labour Government pruned the Foreign Office's covert propaganda arm, the Information Research Department (IRD).(4 ) IRD had grown from its origins in the 1940s to employ hundreds of people and spend nearly 1 million per year on anti-Soviet and anti-Communist propaganda. (5 ) The next year some of the personnel of another covert propaganda operation, this one run ...

... began handing out arms to Muslim students and unionists, before there was any publicly available evidence linking Gestapu to the PKI. (25) Even Sundhaussen, who downplays the Army's role in arming and inciting the civilian murder bands, concludes that, whatever the strength of popular anti-PKI hatred and fear, 'without the Army's anti-PKI propaganda the massacre might not have happened. ' (26) I shall go further and argue that Gestapu, Suharto's response, and the bloodbath were part of a single coherent scenario for a military takeover, a scenario which was again followed closely in Chile in the years 1970-73 (and to some extent in Cambodia in 1970) ...

... (142) tacitly co-operated with the strike. (143) In the background, MI5, which had been working against the Protestant political alliance opposed to the power-sharing executive, changed its policy. 'John Shaw', the work-name of one of the MI5 officers with whom Colin Wallace was working in the black propaganda operation, Information Policy, told Wallace that "London had had a change of mind and now wanted the strike to succeed." This is explained by an unnamed intelligence officer quoted by Bloch and Fitzgerald: "Some of us also hoped that the strike would make progress and Wilson would be defeated. We thought that if the Protestants ...

... the guerrillas to assert their control.(63) These were identified as the creation of 'parallel hierarchies', clandestine cross-cutting vertical and horizontal networks that tightly enmeshed each person in an elaborate, all-encompassing infrastructure geared towards exerting social control;(64) the skilfull and systematic application of action psychologique, which included both mass propaganda directed at groups and 'thought reform' employed against particular individuals; (65) and the ruthless but controlled utilization of terrorism, whether discriminate or indiscriminate, to intimidate the population and complete its psychological separation from the incumbent regime. However, it is important to note that said theorists did not see these as discrete or successive processes, ...